Google listings for VM search pages lead to a 404

[cmendla]

I noticed that some of our google results are showing a 404 when you click on the google search result.  Further investigation showed that google is indexing product search pages from Virtuemart but those pages lead to 404's.

For example, searching site:www.recyclingequipment.com sonac 220 in google results in about 104 items. However, any item with a listing beginning with SEARCH will lead to a 404 page.  The 404 page shows a URL of

https://www.recyclingequipment.com/component/search/?searchphrase=all&searchword=sonac%20220%20%20delavan%20c

I believe that the products are already indexed and that indexing the VM search results pages is redundant.

Questions:

* Does this problem seem to be from the Virtuemart search component or the Joomla search?
* How can I prevent the component from letting google 'find' bad search results from whatever component is causing this?
* Is there anything  else I might be missing here?


I'd greatly appreciate any thoughts.

[GJC Web Design]

from the joomla search component
restrict in the robots.txt any url with /search  in it?